Tavares Strachan | |
|---|---|
 Strachan in 2017 | |
| Born | Nassau, Bahamas |
| Education | College of the Bahamas |
| Alma mater | Rhode Island School of Design, Yale University |
Tavares Henderson Strachan is a Bahamian-born conceptual artist. [1] His contemporary multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. [2] [3] He lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Strachan was born in Nassau, Bahamas on December 16, 1979. [4] Strachan was introduced to the arts as a child through his family’s involvement in Junkanoo, a historical annual parade and cultural celebration incorporating live music, dance, and elaborate costumes hand-made by competing groups. [5]
Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the United States to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he began to pursue more conceptual projects that would foreground the prevalent themes and minimalist aesthetic of his later work. After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, [6] Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. [4]
Strachan’s ambitious and open-ended practice examines the intersection of art, science, and the environment, [7] and has included collaborations with numerous organizations and institutions across the disciplines.
One of Strachan’s most iconic projects was The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (2006), for which he embarked on a journey to the Alaskan Arctic to excavate a 2.5-ton block of ice which was then transported via FedEx to his native Bahamas and displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. [8] [9] The piece is both physically arresting and metaphorically resonant, referencing the fragility of Earth’s homeostatic systems, the strange poetry of cultural and physical displacement, as well as the little-known contributions of Matthew Henson—an under-recognized American explorer and the co-discoverer of the North Pole.
In 2004, Strachan initiated an ambitious four-year multimedia series entitled, Orthostatic Tolerance—the title referring to the physiological stress that cosmonauts endure while exiting and re-entering Earth from outer space. [4] Exhibited in phases between 2008 and 2011, the Orthostatic Tolerance project incorporated photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation documenting Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and in experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC)—the artist’s version of NASA for his native country.
In 2011, Strachan exhibited Seen/Unseen—a survey exhibition of past and present works—at an undisclosed location in New York City that was deliberately closed to the general public. Exploring themes of presence and absence, the exhibition focused on the artist’s critical mandate of positioning works in such a way that some of their aspects are visible while others remain conceptual, asserting the exhibition itself is a work of art in its own right. Both ambitious in scope and disruptive to expectations, Seen/Unseen manifested a type of meditative experience, presenting over 50 works from drawings, photographs, video works, sculpture, and installations in a massive 20,000-square-foot industrial space converted specifically for the exhibition. While access to "Seen/Unseen" was restricted to the organizers, the exhibition itself was fully documented with a website and an illustrated catalogue designed by Stefan Sagmeister.
On December 3, 2018, Strachan launched his project ENOCH into space. [10] Created in collaboration with the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, ENOCH is centered around the development and launch of a 3U satellite that brings to light the forgotten story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut selected for any national space program. [11] The satellite launched via Spaceflight’s SSO-A SmallSat Express mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The sculpture circled the Earth for three years in a Sun-synchronous orbit before reentering on December 21, 2021. [12]
In February 2024, Strachan unveiled The First Supper(Galaxy Black) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The bronze sculpture, overlaid with black patina and gold leaf, reinterprets Da Vinci's The Last Supper with Black historical figures. Haile Selassie takes the place of Jesus, and Strachan takes the place of Judas. The included figures are (from left to right): Tavares Strachan (self portrait), Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Harriet Tubman, Shirley Chisholm, Marcus Garvey, Zumbi dos Palmares, Haile Selassie, Mary Seacole, Matthew Henson, Marsha P. Johnson, King Tubby, Derek Alton Walcott, and Robert Henry Lawrence. [13] [14] [15] [16]
Strachan is represented by Marian Goodman since 2020, and in that same year, the Gallery's London space presented In Plain Sight, the artist's first major UK solo show and in 2020, his The Awakening was presented at Goodman's Manhattan space. [17] [18] [19]
Strachan curated a solo exhibition for his mentor Stanley Burnside in 2022. The exhibition, Stanley Burnside: As Time Goes On, was presented at Galerie Perrotin in New York. [20]
His recognition includes a MacArthur Foundation Grant (2022), [21] the Inaugural Allen Institute artist-in-residence (2018), [22] LACMA Art + Technology Lab artist grant (2014), [23] Tiffany Foundation grant (2008), [24] Grand Arts Residency Fellowship (2007), [25] and Alice B. Kimball fellowship (2006). [26] In 2013, he represented the Bahamas at the 55th Venice Biennale. [5] [27]
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits.
Takashi Murakami is a Japanese contemporary artist. He works in fine arts as well as commercial media and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. His influential work draws from the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of postwar Japanese culture. He is credited for designing the album cover for Kanye West's third studio album Graduation.
John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Kim Dingle is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist working across painting, sculpture, photography, found imagery, and installation. Her practice explores themes of American culture, history, and gender politics through both figurative and abstract approaches.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked together as an artist duo since 1995. Their work explores the relationship between art, architecture and design.
Robert Carleton Hobbs is an American art historian and curator specializing in twentieth-century art. Since 1991 he has held the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair of American Art in the School of Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, a highly ranked art department. Since 2004 he has served as a visiting professor at Yale University. He has held positions at Cornell University, University of Iowa, Florida State University, and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran, and is known for a number of books, in-depth essays, and exhibitions.
Jason Villegas is currently a San Francisco based contemporary artist. He has exhibited across the United States and internationally. Villegas' work utilizes a wide spectrum of mediums including sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, textile, video and performance. He has created his own artistic realm and visual language in which to explore concepts such as globalism, evolution, sexuality, cosmology, and consumerism. Motifs in Villegas' artworks include fashion logos, animal hybrids, weaponry, sales banners, clothing piles, anuses, cosmic debris, taxidermy, bear men, amorphous beasts, religious iconography, and party scenarios.
Miya Ando is an American visual artist recognized for her paintings, sculptures, and installation artworks that address concepts of temporality, interdependence, and impermanence. Ando's artworks have been exhibited in museums, galleries, and public spaces worldwide.
Maria Nordman is a German-American sculptor and conceptual artist. She is known for creating the contexts of FILM ROOMS starting in 1967: FILM ROOM EAT 1967-PRESENT and FILM ROOM EXHALE 1967- PRESENT. These two works are the fulcrum of other works that follow, of other works that follow, enabling new considerations of rooms as sculpture. Her works in film, still photography, and sculpture variously connect to writing, musical projects, architecture, public space, and performance.
Michal Rovner, also known as Michal Rovner Hammer, is an Israeli contemporary artist, she is known for her video, photo, and cinema artwork. Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre (2011) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2002).
Helen Pashgian is an American visual artist who lives and works in Pasadena, California. She is a primary member of the Light and Space art movement of the 1960s, but her role has been historically under-recognized.
Analia Saban is a contemporary conceptual artist who was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but is currently living in Los Angeles, California, United States. Her work takes traditional artistic media such as drawing, painting and sculpture and pushes their limits as a scientific experimentation with art making. Because of her pushing the limits with different forms of art, Saban has taken the line that separated the different art forms and merged them together.
Kambui Olujimi is a New York-based visual artist working across disciplines using installation, photography, performance, tapestry, works on paper, video, large sculptures and painting. His artwork reflects on public discourse, mythology, historical narrative, social practices, exchange, mediated cultures, resilience and autonomy.
Emily Mae Smith is a visual artist from Austin, Texas. Her sly, humorous, and riveting compositions nod to art historical movements such as Greek Mythology and Surrealism through with a distinctly 21st century spin. Her genre-defying paintings speak through a vocabulary of signs and symbols addressing timely subjects including gender, class, and violence. Smith’s paintings tackle art history’s phallocentric myths and create imagery for subjectivities absent in visual culture, specifically the feminist perspective.
Nancy Baker Cahill is an American new media artist based in Los Angeles, California. She has created immersive augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences, video installations and blockchain projects, oftentimes rooted in drawing. Her work frequently merges technology and public art, drawing upon both feminist land art and the history of political interventions to examine systemic power, body autonomy, civics and climate crisis, among other issues.
Caitlin Cherry is an African-American painter, sculptor, and educator.
Rashaad Newsome is an American artist working at the intersection of technology, collage, sculpture, video, music, and performance. Newsome's work celebrates and abstracts Black and Queer contributions to the art canon, resulting in innovative and inclusive forms of culture and media. He lives and works in Oakland, California, and Brooklyn, New York.
Ivan Argote is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in Paris. Using humor and staged interventions, his performance pieces and installations challenge dominant political ideologies.
Joe Ray is an American artist based in Los Angeles. His work has moved between abstraction and representation and mediums including painting, sculpture, performance art and photography. He began his career in the early 1960s and belonged to several notable art communities in Los Angeles, including the Light and Space movement; early cast-resin sculptors, including Larry Bell; and the influential 1970s African-American collective, Studio Z, of which he was a founding member with artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Houston Conwill. Critic Catherine Wagley described Ray as "an artist far more committed to understanding all kinds of light and space than to any specific material or strategy"—a tendency that she and others have suggested led to his being under-recognized.
Stanley "Stan" Burnside is a Bahamian cartoonist, painter, and costume designer. From 1979 to 2019, he penned the Sideburns editorial cartoon for The Nassau Guardian. As a painter, his style was influenced by the collaborative process of Junkanoo, an annual Caribbean street parade. He was a designer and artistic director for the Junkanoo groups Saxon Superstars and One Family. He has also been involved in several artist collaborations with fellow Bahamian artists and co-founded B-CAUSE, an artist collective dedicated to founding a national art gallery for The Bahamas and a national art school. He has been called a "pioneering voice in Afrofuturism".
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
